By Landing Colley
Dozens of journalists from various media houses across the country were on Monday denied entry into the National Assembly to cover the National Assembly proceeding on the draft Constitution – as the Minister of Justice appears before lawmakers.
Hundreds of Gambian journalists without waste any time lashed out at the National Assembly over its action by allowing only GRTS, QTV and Eye Africa Online TV to cover the proceed while denied other media houses.
Speaking to Yusuf Taylor, editor of Gainako online paper said “The laying of the draft constitution must be covered by all interested media houses and every citizen has the right to witness it if there is capacity. And if they reach the limit capacity then they can stop people from entering that is understandable due to Covid-19.”
“They don’t know whether they have reached the capacity and they stopped reporters from going inside just because they are not from GRTS, Q TV and Eye Africa. Is this how they empower the media and is this how they empower their people who are supposed to feed on this information they provide?”
He added further that “I am disappointed and we as media house should make sure that we talk about this that we were stop from documenting this in history,” he added.
Kemeseng Sanneh expressed that “we are here to cover the National Assembly session sitting on the new draft constitution but the securities informed us that they have been ordered to allow only three media houses which are GRTS, Q TV, and Eye Africa, and other media houses are not allow.”
He said: “The constitution of the country has not discriminated anybody and what they have done is not in-line with constitution. If we were covering their sitting before why today do they come up with today’s rules? We want to believe that they want to hide something from the public and that should not be done.”
According to him, the National Assembly is an organ which is responsible for enacting laws and to defend those laws but now they are violating those laws.
However, he called on the Ministers of Information, Justice and the Human Rights Commission to engage the National Assembly over the wrong decision which is not